‘When my family came here … there were six log cabins': Tuktoyaktuk set to change with permanent road to rest of Canada

David Nasogaluak invites me to his house, telling me over a long distance phone connection that crackles and breaks how it would be much better for him to meet in person because he is 80-years-old and has plenty of time to talk because he doesn’t do much work anymore, save for the work of getting through another day in an achy, old man’s body that has seen a lot of years — and winters — in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories.

“I’m old now, eh,” Mr. Nasogaluak says, chuckling. “When I was young I didn’t worry too much about things. Now that I am old I look for easier things to do.”

Like talking to a reporter, in person, though the phone will do just fine since the story the Inuit elder has been telling me is about a Tuktoyaktuk — or “Tuk,” in the locals’ parlance — from another time, a place that exists only in memory and black and white photographs.

“When my family came here by boat in 1941 there were six log cabins and six families here,” Mr. Nasogaluak says. “To get anywhere you went by dogsled, or by a small wooden boat.

“The barge came once a year, in July, to drop supplies for the Hudson’s Bay store — flour and sugar and dried fruit and oats, things that couldn’t be spoiled.”

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In more recent decades the barge has been joined by a seasonal ice road tracing the frozen Mackenzie River delta, an icy ribbon immortalized by the reality television series, Ice Road Truckers. There is also an airstrip tying an Inuit outpost of some 800 souls on the Beaufort Sea, which is closer to Alaska than it is to the rest of Canada, to points south. The links to the outside world, however, were never more concrete than the next cancelled flight or an early spring thaw on the Mackenzie.

But Tuk’s time in relative isolation is nearing its end. On Wednesday the community, even old timers like David Nasogaluak, were buzzing over the news out of Inuvik, some 137 km to the southwest, where Prime Minister Stephen Harper was on hand for a formal groundbreaking ceremony to mark the beginning of the construction of the Inuvik-to-Tuktoyaktuk highway. It is a gravel road, this $300-million new “highway,” and yet, symbolically, it is something greater: the first year-round road linking the Canadian Arctic coast to the rest of Canada.

Preliminary work on the project is nearly complete, and the highway is projected to be open by 2018. The idea behind the link, which will hook up to the Dempster Highway running through the Yukon, dates back to the John Diefenbaker era.

“Prime Minister Diefenbaker knew then what our government is undertaking today,” Mr. Harper told the crowd in Inuvik. “Constructing a highway will improve the lives of people living in the North for generations to come, facilitating economic development, creating jobs and enabling cost-effective, safe and reliable transportation of goods to and from northern communities.”

Building a highway on an Arctic tundra crisscrossed by streams is a delicate business. Engineers must preserve the integrity of the permafrost to prevent the road from sinking, from becoming a warren of potholes, sinkholes and washouts. To avoid damaging the permafrost project engineers will put a blanket, of sorts, over it, and build up — instead of digging down — while doing most of the work in winter to minimize whatever permafrost damage there is.

Once complete the highway will join the Deh Cho Bridge, which opened in 2012 and removed the need for ferries to cross the Mackenzie River south of Yellowknife, as the second major upgrade to the N.W.T.’s infrastructure. But the real boon for outposts like Tuk, however, is a projected reduction in shipping costs for essentials, such as groceries, that should net about $1.5-million a year in savings.

“This road is going to be a good thing,” Mr. Nasogaluak says. “Everything costs so much here. Prices are sky high and…”

And modern life isn’t what traditional Inuit life used to be. Mr. Nasogaluak spent his youth hunting polar bears and foxes. He fished for 23 different species and shot seals — 350 by his best recollection in the summer of 1967 alone. He skinned them with an “ulu,” a traditional Inuit knife, and fed the meat to his sled dogs to keep them running before skidoos replaced the dogs in the 1970s and he became a reindeer herder. Shooting wolves, working hard, and not for the big, oil drilling and diamond mining bucks. But for enough to get by in a subsistence environment that was fast becoming a relic from another time whose time was done.

The modern life, Mr. Nasogaluak lamented in a television interview a few years back, is all about chasing jobs and Canadian currency. Hard, outdoor work among the youth has been replaced by the soft comforts of a couch in front of a television. Peering at a screen, at a window to the outside world, when the real world is never any further away than a man’s front door.

Now, says Mr. Nasogaluak, the rest of the world is coming to Tuktoyaktuk. Running straight at it, hard and fast, on a new gravel highway. This, the Inuit elder tells me, is progress. A good thing, and a thing, he adds, that we should really talk more about just as soon as I make it to Tuk — just as soon as I am able to drive there.

“Come by my place, young man,” Mr. Nasogaluak says. “I could tell you stories for hours.”